After Lifers

Chapter Two

Chapter Two

I do not like green eggs and ham, but I do love you Sam I am.

Eyes the color of bright green taffy are the last thing I will remember in my body. Cassie's body. I keep having to remind myself. Samuel is staring across the seat and he's upset.

But I can't remember why.

Time well spent worrying about a thing I cannot change.

Next, I remember nothingness. A great nothingness that was followed by a great every thingness. I'd jumped out of Sam's 1968 Chevy, angry with him, and stomped into the woods all alone.

It was fast after that, like disaster always is. A lightning strike.

Bam. Cassie Mullins,you're dead. Just like that.

Would I wake in a meadow? Yes. Yes I would. But it wasn't an earthly meadow of plain fern and pine with a golden sun, no. Instead, it was vibrant grass in technicolor stolen from the Wizard of Oz's emerald city, only, a hundred times brighter. Skies of every color, rainbows colliding with aurora borealis, stream in a waterfall into a body of water that's too still to be the ocean.

Off in the distance, there are hundreds of small suns, all of them white. White suns...? I can look right at them.

One gigantic blue moon is close enough to touch.

Would I wake up in a robe? Yes. Yes I would. In a robe of linen so soft and flowy, it flows and flows, a part of me.

Music. Not a chime or a bell or a tinkle, but a united swell of voices in song.

I find a place, a majestic place at the end of a road of glass. I open the door, and the music fills me, the voices loosen my particles,dispersing me into a hundred different directions. I can't will them back together again.

At once, I'm me and I'm walking toward a throne of blue.Glass like the road, only glittering like a diamond.

A whistle distracts me.

I turn to find a man standing outside. He has a clip board,and he's dressed like my old life, and he's urgently moving his hands in a beckoning motion.

When I don't move, he points at me angrily, and then away from where I am.

I come out of the room, and the doors slam shut behind me cutting off the sound.

"Cassie?"

I nod.

"Good. I'm glad we found you."

"Am I dead?"

"Do you feel dead?"

"No."

"Good. You are more alive than you've ever been before."